My primary research interests involve parenting, child care, and children's social and cognitive development. I am currently collaborating with other researchers at UNCG on the STAR project examining emotional and cognitive contributions to early school success (for more information, see http://www.star4kids.org/). I also contribute to the RIGHT Track project, a longitudinal study of children's social behavior (http://www.uncg.edu/~psycap/righttrack.html). I am also interested in parenting and family adaptation when a child is diagnosed with a developmental disability, and published a book for professionals who work with families of children with autism, Beyond the Autism Diagnosis (http://www.brookespublishing.com/store/books/obrien-7519/index.htm). For the last 15 years I have been one of the investigators for the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, a national longitudinal study of more than 1,200 families from 10 locations around the U.S. For more information about this study, see http://secc.rti.org.
At UNCG, I am the Director of the Family Research Center (www.uncg.edu/frc), where faculty and graduate students conduct research on a wide range of issues involving families and children. I teach graduate courses in social development and research methods.
I also serve the School of Human Environmental Sciences (http://www.uncg.edu/hes/) as Associate Dean for Research. In this capacity, I work to enhance the School's scholarship and research mission.

Objective . The authors examined mothers’ beliefs about their children's negative emotions and their emotion socialization practices. Design . A total of 65 African American and 137 European American mothers of 5-year-old children reported their beli...

The present study examined the role of cardiovascular regulation in predicting pediatric obesity. Participants for this study included 268 children (141 girls) obtained from a larger ongoing longitudinal study. To assess cardiac vagal regulation, res...

Trajectories of children’s temperamental reactivity (negative affectivity and surgency) were examined in a community sample of 370 children across the ages of 4 to 7 using Hierarchical Linear Modeling. Children’s physiological reactivity (respiratory...

Dynamic relations during the preschool years across processes of control and understanding in the domains of emotion and cognition were examined. Participants were 263 children (42% non-White) and their mothers who were seen first when the children w...

Associations between maternal sensitivity to infant distress and nondistress and infant social-emotional adjustment were examined in a subset of dyads from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care (N = 376). Mothers reported on infant temperament at 1 and...

Drawing from a domain specificity perspective, we assert that maternal sensitivity to infant distress cues is distinct from maternal sensitivity to non-distress cues. We review evidence from prior research demonstrating that the two constructs have m...

In this study, we examined the hypothesis that preschoolers' performance on emotion and cognitive tasks is organized into discrete processes of control and understanding within the domains of emotion and cognition. Additionally, we examined the relat...

The relations between 4 sources of family stress (marital dissatisfaction, home chaos, parental depressive symptoms, and job role dissatisfaction) and the emotion socialization practice of mothers’ and fathers’ responses to children’s negative emotio...

Trajectories of emotion regulation processes were examined in a community sample of 269 children across the ages of 4 to 7 using hierarchical linear modeling. Maternal depressive symptomatology (Symptom Checklist–90) and children’s physiological reac...

Children who develop persistence in the preschool years are likely to function more effectively during the transition into school. In this study of 231 3-year-old children and their mothers, we examined the relations among family social status, mater...

Theory of mind competence and knowledge of emotions were studied longitudinally in a sample of preschoolers aged 3 (n=263) and 4 (n=244) years. Children were assessed using standard measures of theory of mind and emotion knowledge. Three competing hy...

Maternal expressive styles, based on a combination of positive and negative expressive patterns, were identified at two points in time and related to multiple aspects of preschool children's emotional development. Mother–child pairs from 260 families...

Vagal tone (measured via respiratory sinus arrhythmia, RSA) and vagal withdrawal (measured by decreases in RSA) have been identified as physiological measures of self-regulation, but little is known how they may relate to the regulation of cognitive ...

Objective. This study examines links between maternal and paternal attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and parenting practices that require inhibition of impulses, sustained attention, and consistency; the role of home chaos in t...

Background: There is a rapid decline in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) during middle childhood and adolescence. Information on the environmental factors implicated in this decline is limited. This study focuses on family factors associ...

Developmental precursors to children's early understanding of gratitude were examined. A diverse group of 263 children was tested for emotion and mental state knowledge at ages 3 and 4, and their understanding of gratitude was measured at age 5. Chil...

Using a sample of 263 mother–child dyads, we examined the extent to which maternal emotional and cognitive support during a joint problem-solving task when children were 3-years-old predicted children's academic skills 1 year later independent of eac...

Objectives- To examine reciprocal relations between body mass index (BMI), internalizing problems and externalizing problems from infancy through middle childhood with a focus on sex and history of overweight.
Study design- Data from 1254 children i...

Although shyness has often been found to be negatively related to vocabulary, few studies have examined the processes that produce or modify this relation. The present study examined executive functioning skills and home environmental stimulation as ...